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eBay Now Accepting Bitcoin!

Braintree, the payments processing company owned by eBay, said Monday that its customers would soon be able to accept Bitcoin, the digital currency popular in some tech and finance circles.

The company, which eBay bought for $800 million in cash one year ago, is considered a more developer-friendly division of PayPal, eBay’s online payments behemoth. Many of Braintree’s clients are tech start-ups like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, businesses that are looking for easy ways to integrate payments into their products for a low cost.

Rich"Failure is Not a Destination"
Coach K on the Dan Patrick Show, December 22, 2016

Do these folks somehow need to launder their stolen bitcoins? Given that they are unique, aren't they instantly identifiable if spent?

You could buy a hell of a lot of car washes for $65 mil.

"Instantly" isn't quite right, but on those whole, yes. People often erroneously describe Bitcoin and certain other cryptocurrencies using blockchains as anonymous, when in reality Bitcoin is perhaps the least anonymous currency in existence - that's fundamental to the mechanics of the blockchain ledger. There is just a layer of separation between wallet and wallet owner that obscures owner identity.

I haven't looked into it in a while but there was at least one service available that could be used for enhancing wallet privacy (and facilitating laundering) by acting as an intermediary between many users, splitting coins in many transactions such that wallets could be identified as part of a large network of transactions but the actual transaction of interest would be obscured.

"Instantly" isn't quite right, but on those whole, yes. People often erroneously describe Bitcoin and certain other cryptocurrencies using blockchains as anonymous, when in reality Bitcoin is perhaps the least anonymous currency in existence - that's fundamental to the mechanics of the blockchain ledger. There is just a layer of separation between wallet and wallet owner that obscures owner identity.

Yeah, but the layer between the wallet and the wallet owner is what we would typically think of as anonymity. We may know the Bitcoin involved is stolen, but we don't know whose hands actually did the stealing.

Instead of telling me computer words about what these digital currencies are, tell me this: Is it better than cash? That I hold in my hand? That buys me a burrito? That buys me a basketball? That buys me a house? That buys me a fighter jet? Is it better than that? No it is not. You are engaged in a massive global act of speculation that will inevitably crash and burn and leave people like you gnashing your teeth and rending your garments and searching your soul about why you went out and spent all your real money on fake “coins” that don’t “exist” except in everyone’s “imagination.”